


The Ivy and the Wall

by buckstiel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Fraternity, Drinking Games, Hydra (Marvel), Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, SHIELD, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-09
Updated: 2014-09-09
Packaged: 2018-02-16 17:27:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2278413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Most of the Inter-Fraternity Council doesn't believe he exists," Natasha said. "The ones who do call him the Winter Bro. He's strong, really fast at flip cup, and apparently has an arm made of Natty Light cans but frankly I think that's bullshit."</p><p>Rumors from the previous summer about Hydra (Eta Upsilon Delta) dismantling rival fraternity Shield (Sigma Lamba Delta) from the inside gain traction once the fall semester gets underway, especially with the sudden appearance of a new intimidating Hydra brother no one at Shield has ever seen before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ivy and the Wall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gsparkle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gsparkle/gifts).



> About a month or so ago, my friend and I shouted at each other via text message for about three hours over this AU so I decided to actually do something about it. 
> 
> I gleaned all this from my own college experience so take that as you will! The fraternity names are all made up but the sororities aren't--I mean nothing by it in any way shape or form.

The rumor spread through beach week much like all rumors on the Greek circuit did: all at once, and then in brief little bursts followed by someone saying, _are people still really talking about that?_

The one thing they all knew for sure was the rumor’s proverbial ground zero, the dead center of the local raunchy nightclub that had a normal name but whose vaguely-suggestive nickname shone far brighter in the limelight. The details of the origin story varied after that. The entire marching band group swore up and down that the weird German exchange student Johann--yeah, that guy who got thrown out halfway through fall semester last year?--had danced up behind that one blond dude’s terrifying girlfriend and whispered it menacingly in her ear. The fencing team was convinced they had _literally_ seen those two dudes from those two frats that really hate each other, yeah, well they were _making out_ and then the bomb dropped. But then they had talked to Pepper Potts who, even nursing her third cup of coffee with a side of Advil the following morning (or was it afternoon?), told them dead on that drunk eyes blow everything out of proportion and that Brock had merely roughly poked Steve in the chest a couple times and said, _you guys better watch out this year._

“And now we’ve got all this,” she said with a grin over her coffee cup. “Everyone left and right talking about how Hydra is actually going to dismantle Shield and become the school’s number one fraternity.” Tony tossed his sheets of notes over his head with an eye roll. All that research, all those hours wasted when he could have simply asked her first. “Please don’t think you’re leaving here without picking this up, because I don’t know what sort of ship you all run over at the Shield house, but--”

“Yes, yes, Pepper, I know.” And then, over the shoulder running out the door--”Does that wet blanket really help your hangover that much?”

But it was still only the third day of beach week, and Tony had a combination beer pong and corn hole tourney to organize between Shield and the lovely ( _but not as lovely as Pepper, clearly_ ) ladies of Chi-O--and one thing led to another, which led to one thing falling out of any memory center of his brain after another, while elsewhere the issue of the rivalry between the two frats becoming anything but friendly continued to grow, and by the time the late night rolled back into their lives, it had grown to legendary proportions.

But after enough shots and neon lights, though, nobody really cared.

Maybe they should have. There was something about the looming three and a half months free from late nights at libraries and cramming for exams that that made going out during this particular week so much better than doing so back at school. For one, sand was everywhere, and according to Clint that just made things “more exciting.” But it was really only a last hoorah for a year that was somehow already over and one of the many, many excuses on Tony’s List to get incredibly, impossibly drunk.

The rumor hardly ever came up after that. (Yes, there was that one girl a few canopy-tents down from them who kept peeking over the top of her friend’s battered Carl Sagan book to reiterate that “there’s going to be a real bro war on Greek row next year, Jane, a broar, if you will,” but they moved further down the beach for the rest of the week. And really, it was just to escape Steve laughing at all the bad jokes he would overhear and inevitably spring upon them later. Unforgivable.) In the flurry of summer jobs and unpaid internships, it was all but forgotten--that is, until Nick Fury opened the door to his room the following August, suitcases still slung over his shoulder, to find Natasha and Maria sitting cross-legged on his bed.

“We’re going to have to call a meeting.”

* * *

 

“So the first order of business--”

“The first order of business should really be why we’re having our super-secret officers meeting in the walk-in pantry, but I suppose it’s none of my business.”

“It probably actually is your business, Tony,” Fury said, “because you put all the kegs for the party this weekend in the meeting room.” He glared at him over the top of his sunglasses, being sure to squint extra hard with his bad eye.

“Well, it was my executive decision as treasurer of this fine fraternity--”

“Both of you shut up,” Maria said. “This is the last place they’ll expect us to have an important meeting.”

The hammer dropped quite suddenly, and it wasn’t even the really fancy hammer Fury normally got to use at these sorts of things, either. Remember that rumor that circulated around the beach carried on the wings of drunken speculation? It had some merit. Quite a bit of merit, actually, if the sisters at KΔ were to be believed.

“Of course they would be,” Tony said quickly. “They’re very reputable.”

“Not everything we say about KΔ is secretly about Pepper, relax,” Natasha sighed, pelting him in the face with a nearby bag of chips.

The fact was that Natasha had been over at the KΔ house earlier that morning and heard two sophomores unpacking and talking about their summers, nothing really notable, until one of them had let slip that she had started dating Jasper Sitwell when they were both taking bio lab over summer session--”You know, that cute Hydra brother with the glasses?” “You mean the bald one?” “Shut _up_.”--and apparently he was the type to tell his girlfriends everything.

And everything included, at least this time, the oh-so-minor detail that Hydra was planning on dismantling Shield from the inside by the time the next beach week rolled around, or so help them Sam Adams.

“But why would they want to get rid of us completely?” Steve interrupted.

“You naive little snowflake.” No one was quite sure how Tony could infuse even basic brotherly shoulder grabs with his snark, but no one ever tried to deny it was a thing. “I don’t know how your old school worked--”

“According to the _traditions_ of brotherhood and cooperation--”

“Yeah yeah yeah, okay,” he said with a wave, which sent a box of cereal tumbling onto Maria’s head. “Welcome to the modern world of the Greek system, bro. Eat or be eaten. Chant ‘chug’ in the crowd or be the one at the other end facing a near-full bottle of Jäger tumbling into your face and brothers you can’t bear to disappoint.”

“That was specific.”

“But it’s the truth,” Fury said shortly. “We are not about to lose our distinction as the premier fraternity at this school because someone else decided they could also moonlight as a spy organization.”

Steve tried to direct his frown into the unopened bag of solo cups pressing into the side of his face lest Tony start to give him even more shit.

But they had a plan, never fret. (“Nobody was, Phil, chill.”) With ragers thumping all over campus this fine move-in weekend, packing every frat house, apartment, and bar from door to wall, Hydra wouldn’t be able to notice one face in the throng--not through the haze of alcohol and humid body heat when their feet would be too preoccupied with that sticky spot on the floor they could never seem to miss.

“For your sake, I hope that this is better than the bid cards you designed last semester,” Fury said.

“It is,” Phil sighed with only the smallest hint that Fury had prodded an old bruise. The bid cards had said in size seventy-two impact font, _I’D LIKE TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT THE AVENGERS INITIATIVE_ and nothing else, and the pledge process ended up being two weeks behind schedule because none of the freshmen had figured out it was talking about Shield, much less that it was a bid card. It was a reference to their motto, he had argued, but how were the new pledges supposed to know that?

“It definitely is,” Natasha added, casually throwing out a smirk that had even Fury just the slightest bit nervous.

 

* * *

 

Eta Upsilon Delta, better known as Hydra to the student population of the university, prided itself on having taken over the house just off frat row that most called The Berghof--surrounded by dark crooked pine trees and in a certain state of disarray that made Hydra _the_ frat to party with on Halloween, brothers liked to say it was their own personal tribute to the HYΔ Alpha chapter at University of Munich. It was an odd story, not one people liked to really look into especially given the uncomfortable name some insensitive bro had coined for the place, but most other students casually ignored the fact that there really was no way they could have been founded in Germany based off some rudimentary Google searches. If it made them feel better about that run-down house, then so be it.

This was the house that was currently spilling over the brim with people--what grass there was in the front yard was being ground into the dirt beneath Sperrys and high heels, all careful to keep the ruckus off the sidewalk and out of technicalities laid out by the city’s police, and even the second-story roof had its fair share of bros tightly gripping empty shot glasses in the spaces between their fingers. This was the house Natasha Romanoff stood before, sporting a blonde wig, a form-fitting black dress, and a vague idea of a mission solidifying slowly at the tips of her fingers.

The mission checklist grew longer with every deliberate step up the front walk around the other students who were swaying dangerously for the relatively early hour. (Honestly, Hydra parties could rage until sunrise if the kegs and gin buckets lasted long enough, and they often did. These freshmen didn’t stand a chance if they were already stumbling before 11:30.) So the first bullet on the list--don’t let any of these children spill their drinks on this dress because it was dry clean only, and the dry cleaner closest to campus was a ten-minute drive, and this dress was her favorite for these covert ops Fury pretended not to know about.

To her right, some freshman--clearly designated by the lanyard half-tucked underneath his polo collar--dry heaved, and in one fluid motion she grabbed his red cup from his hands and replaced it with the water bottle from her purse. Maybe it would have been better to let him learn the hard way, but maybe she didn’t want to risk it anyway.

Covert ops could mean a number of things, at any rate.

“Hold up, beautiful,” the bouncer on the front stoop said with a firm hand on her shoulder, which he quickly removed when he caught the pointed glare she shot his way. “No outside drinks. House rules.” He motioned to the cup she had swiped from the boy.

“That’s fine.” It wouldn’t have been any use correcting him so she chugged it, not breaking eye contact, and tossed the cup over her shoulder. It wasn’t strong, not by a long shot--she tasted a weird combination of juices, probably from them cleaning out the fridge before the start of the semester, and the cheapest vodka the liquor store probably carried, the kind that was 35 percent alcohol and 60 percent hangover by volume. Typical.

“You twenty-one?”

“I am.”

“You sure don’t look it, sweetheart.”

Technically she was still three weeks from her twenty-first birthday, but it wasn’t like these bouncers actually checked IDs. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“John.”

“John what?”

“John Garrett--listen honey,” he said with a grin Natasha could only describe as shit-eating, as in if she had her way in the next twenty seconds he would definitely be eating actual shit, “are you twenty-one or not--”

“My name is Nora Romans, vice president of Tri Delt, and I’m sure my sisters would not be pleased to hear about you unnecessarily harassing one of their own at the door when it’s never been a problem before.”

The panicked, blinding dawn of realization had never been so sweet.

But, as usual, savoring that feeling could only last so long as she remembered exactly why Hydra parties were so low in her ledger--sure, there was a certain bit of bias there being a brother of Shield and all, but when it regularly took ten minutes to get through the main hallway to the booze kitchen and the stairway to the basement dance floor, it was a miracle that anyone showed up after their first go-round. Or so they all said at Shield. And by the way people showed up in droves on Friday and Saturday nights, miracles happened every week.

Bullet two on the list--find Brock Rumlow. It was common knowledge in Tri Delt--and across all the sororities, Natasha knew for a fact--that the president of HYΔ had had the mysterious Nora Romans on his radar ever since she was elected to their exec board and that he could never seem to find her to woo her properly at any party, at any philanthropy event, at any large lecture class in her supposed psychology major. Oh, he’d seen pictures, heard the stories, built her up in his mind, she had made sure of it; and now that the hour was nigh she was going to cash in on her efforts. Hydra boys had a tendency not to always think with the brain in their skull, after all.

“Jasper!” She spotted him next to the keg in the corner of the kitchen, helping some poor girl get the beer into her cup. She’d clearly never operated one before. Across from them at the counter, a small crowd had gathered to push their way to the cooler of their signature Centipede punch, a lethal combination of Everclear, Red Bull, and whatever fruity drink they could scrounge up from the brothers.

“Ah, hi--Nora, right? From Tri Delt?”

“The very same.” She met his flickering falsely-unsure grin with a small smirk of her own, the kind that made Clint immediately blush and trip over his own feet or feel like his stomach just slammed to the ground. Jasper didn’t know what to do with it either, especially coupled with the lie. If he was as close to Brock as everyone knew and didn’t know Nora Romans on sight, then he was far simpler than Tony had made him out to be.

“You seen Brock?” she continued. The girl, cup barely spilling over the brim with froth, took the opportunity to scoot away as quickly as the shifted crowds would let her. There was a slight panic to her as if she had lost track of the group from her dorm she had undoubtedly come with. “Honey, check outside,” Natasha said, lightly grabbing her wrist. “I saw some other freshmen out there.” The girl nodded and disappeared into the throng.

“That was nice,” Jasper said.

“Less liability for y’all.” Natasha may have grown up in Russia, but Nora was from Charlotte, North Carolina. Nora said “y’all,” loved pork barbeque and Panthers football, and could drink anyone under the table with a handle of Jack Daniels. It was a collection of items she had to remind herself of every few minutes with the chugged Centipede finally hitting her system. No Russian curses under her breath, no ignoring conversations about who was going to take the NFC South this year. “So Brock.”

“Right,” he sighed, reaching for a cup precariously perched on the top of the nearby fridge. “I think I saw him slip upstairs with our social chair? He should be down in like, half an hour or so.” The swig he took from his cup was not a small one.

“Who is that again? Y’all’s social chair?”

“Arnim, believe it or not. You know,” he said, when she tilted her head, “small little guy. Glasses. Guy’s got a different bow tie for every day of the month--”

“Oh, right him.” A pause. “Really? Social chair?” Tony had told them umpteen times in between mouthfuls of Chipotle about the twitchy little Arnim Zola who has always seemed to be in his engineering labs since fall semester of freshman year, with “those beady little eyes following my every movement, god he is uncomfortable.”

“I’ll let Brock know you were looking for him,” Jasper said curtly. It was a shoo-away. A “don’t ask more questions.” A good thing to take note of.

With Arnim Zola’s name written in bold red letters and highlighted on that collection of mental post-its, Natasha took a moment in her corner of the kitchen to assess her surroundings. The room had a good view of the front hallway and two stairwells up and down as well as what was probably first intended as living and dining rooms but now housed furniture pushed up against the walls and far too many people than fire code would be happy with.

“Oh my god, the list to sign up for beer pong is so long,” a blonde girl complained in passing to her friend, whom she was hanging off of. They had come, Natasha guessed, from the direction of the living rooms, even if their current trajectory through the crowd didn’t suggest it. Where there was beer pong, there would be people, and where there were people, there would be loose drunk tongues willing to spill all the information they had: the ideal.

She picked up an empty red cup from the stack currently peeking out of their plastic wrapping and held it closely to her chest as she pushed her way through the people. This was exactly why she tended not to frequent parties that were open to the entire damn school. Too many people pressed up on each other, fogging up the windows no matter which end of the spectrum the temperature was outside, and the mix of sweat, booze, and smoke was nauseating enough to make even the heartiest of drinkers sometimes think about finding a toilet or bush to stick their heads in. But a mission was a mission, and if she backed out now, she would never hear the end of it and, more importantly, her fellow Shield brothers would start to ask how she got into the fraternity in the first place and those weren’t questions they needed to be asking, frankly. (Those boys wouldn’t have lasted this long without her and Maria anyway.)

The dining room, or whatever it had been once, had been converted into a dance floor, and even with the music pulsing through the speakers mounted on old empty kegs, no one had quite gotten drunk enough to really start dancing. Natasha’s eyes were drawn to one couple making out in the corner and, beyond that, the red light glowing around the silhouettes around the pong table.

“Haven’t seen you around these parts before.” The voice was close and quiet in her left ear, followed close behind by a hand on her right hip. It was an odd accent she couldn’t quite place, somewhere halfway between New York City and Eastern Europe, and even in the heat of all those intoxicated people the tips of his fingers felt cold through her dress. “What’s your name?”

“Nora,” she said, looking up to catch his face--surprisingly she couldn’t place that either, and she frowned before she could stop herself. He definitely had the signature Hydra pin on the underside of his popped collar, but since when did they have a brother that she didn’t know backwards and forwards? “I’m in Tri Delt. I came here looking for--”

“Brock I take it? Yeah, he had to step out. But I saw you were admiring the pong set up. It’s new this year. We call it the Red Room.” His grin was easy and extended up to the corners of his eyes, she guessed, but they were hidden behind what looked like an expensive pair of sunglasses. _Douchebag alert_ , said Clint’s voice in her head, and combined with the backwards snapback and plaid shorts--among _so many other things_ \--she was inclined to agree.

“Red Room? Not very creative,” she deadpanned.

“We’re working on it.” The music faded out, started back up slow waiting for a bass to drop. “You want to get a game of flip cup started?”

This one sure had an agenda. “Not really my speed, dude."

“Well then. Should I aim higher or lower?”

“Depends. Where’s ‘Fuck Your Shit’ on your scale?” _Take a hint, please._

“Not sure I’ve heard of that one. How do you play?”

She forced her eyes shut just to keep him from seeing her roll them. What an enormous waste of time--there was no way anyone would have recognized her as a Shield brother in this getup, and there was an even lower chance that this mysterious addition knew jack shit about anything going on in their exec meetings.

Though the last time she had underestimated Hydra, she had lost two hundred dollars betting on them flubbing against Chi Mu Nu in the finals of that Inter-Greek soccer tournament. XMN had gotten absolutely decimated, and everyone who had seen them play in the preliminaries had sworn up and down that those guys had to be mutants to play that well. Odd word choice, but it still had been wrong.

“It’s complicated,” she said finally, turning around to face him directly. “You never did tell me what your name was.”

“It’s complicated,” he said with a smirk. The music was heating up again, the electronica overtones squealing over the low murmur of the oncoming bass. “So how about that game of flip cup, huh?”

It wasn’t where she wanted to end up, not by a long shot. The Red Room was noisy, cheers far too shrill or booming to be completely covered up by the music in the next room over, and there was a certain sense of spectacle that felt like a sized-down version of a home football game: taking sides, coaching from the stands, and if she didn’t know any better she could have sworn there was a vuvuzela somewhere in the fray of it all, but it reduced down to a dull roar punctuated by the bass, that bass vibrating against the kegs and through the heels of her shoes.

“You know how to play, right?” Again that voice right in her ear--maybe it was a matter of practicality, something to ensure she could hear him in all the noise, but probably not. It was probably something else. “I won’t have to teach you will I?”

“I know how to play, hun,” she said, laying on the southern accent thickly, feigning a slight drunken sway. “This ain’t my first lap around frat row.”

“Doesn’t mean you still can’t learn. C’mon, my usual team’s already here.”

He led her to the far length of the table, and these were Hydra brothers Natasha recognized, the ones whose majors she knew off the top of her head, who didn’t have a brief hookup in the pantry she hadn’t heard about. Alex Pierce, former president, who stepped down when it became apparent he was going for the seven-year plan stood beside Arnim, pasty and twitchy as ever, and clearly through with whatever meeting he had with Brock upstairs--but Brock was nowhere to be found, at least not in the immediate throng of spectators.

“What’re you looking for?” the mystery brother whispered to her again. “Game’s in front of you.” And so it was: a gaggle of the freshmen she had spotted when she first arrived pushed the four bravest of the bunch forward to face the four full cups of cheap beer before them. It hardly seemed fair. “Okay,” he said loudly. “We’re starting on opposite ends”--pointing to the curly-haired brunette across from him and Alex on the other far corner--”and whoever wins goes on to the next round.”

He smirked at her again, and from the way his face twitched around those insipid sunglasses, he probably winked too. Which was awful, absolutely awful. If this had been any other night under any other circumstances he would have gotten her middle finger right up in his face for the ear whispering alone.

As soon as he shouted go, the freshmen should have just walked away. It was a slaughter. Alex had finished within ten seconds and Arnim was already on his fourth flipping attempt by the time the first girl was just halfway through her beer. All around them the cheering and yelling was loud, thankfully too loud to pick out individual words, but it buzzed at Natasha’s eardrums and it certainly thrummed uncomfortably on the girl’s--and part of her seriously wanted to call it quits on their behalf. These were kids who hadn’t even gotten used to the taste of beer yet, it seemed. They were babies.

And then it was finally the Mystery Brother’s turn--the entire drink was down his throat like his stomach had turned into a small vacuum and with a deftly artful twitch of his fingers, the cup flipped perfectly on the first try. The face twitched again. Another wink. Another suppressed eye roll as well as a minor look of awe. _No emotion, Natasha, you have to flip your damn cup._

The first girl had finally finished her beer and had started trying to flip the cup, dropping it on the floor multiple times, her friends trying to be encouraging while the rest of the student roared and clamored around them--and with that damn vuvuzela _somewhere_ \--so there was no pressure to be quick aside from the intent gaze burning into the side of her face while she watched the poor girl finally make it and the rest of the room erupt into cheering.

This was nothing like vodka, nothing like the homemade stuff she heard her dad making in her parents’ bathroom that made her mom come take showers in her own with the bright red shower curtain--those burned something real, not the fake burn of a weak beer’s carbonation when it bubbled down to the stomach. Not the brief burst and sizzle when this American vodka hit the back of the throat. It was a slap at most, not a punch, not something that a scrunched-up face could recover from with a few shudders and a shrug. The beer went down quickly, almost as quickly as the Mystery Brother’s, and she lined the cup upside down along the edge of the table like it was something people did every day and one flip, no, fell on its side; two flip, went scuttling across the table; three flip, right side up, finally, and she was met with an approving grin.

“All right, you guys, maybe next time,” Alex said to the freshmen, waving them off. The last two that had yet to go sighed with wide eyes, jerking their heads toward the door outside.

Natasha felt a knot in her chest loosening as she watched the group of them leave. Good. Go home. _Walk before you run._

“Who’s next?” called Alex, and one brave soul pried herself up from her seat to stand before the refilled cups, both hands on her hips and grinning at the three Hydra brothers like she was planning on eating them. The remaining three were a little slower in revealing themselves.

“Y’know,” Mystery Brother said, leaning on the table and looking back up at Natasha, “you weren’t bad.”

“You’re saying that like it’s news to me.”

“I can help you be better. Watch.” He picked up an empty cup from the floor and positioned it at the edge of the table, upside down. “Put your hand under it like you’re going to flip it.” So she did, and he lined his left hand beneath hers, palm up. “Sorry if my hands are a little cold, poor circulation.” But she said nothing. Just waited for him to get on with the damn show, already. “You gotta get the fingers right. That’s all there is, just like--” The two fingers he had beneath her index and middle jerked up, flipping the cup. It landed right side up. “That.”

His hand lingered just a few seconds longer than she felt it should have, and this time his grin held teeth, shiny and white against the dark tint of those fucking glasses, and she would have thought about snow if the house wasn’t already so hot and sticky and if the wig weren’t making her skull sweat.

No team stood a chance after that. The confident girl who jumped up for round two--Kate, judging by the shouts coming from her friends--ended up accidentally swallowing her beer the wrong way, the coughing fit costing them any chance of winning. More groups of freshmen tried to save the good name of their graduating class to no avail, and even if some of them had experience with this at high school parties, the low chuckles of the Hydra brothers in the surrounding crowd had that undertone of _welcome to the big leagues, kid,_ and by the time 2 am hit no one was volunteering their own drinking-game victimhood and the watery beer had managed to give them a bit of a buzz.

In all the chaos, there still had been no sign of Brock.

There were, however, still so many signs of this unknown bro with a Hydra pin latched to his lapel, and it was clear what he was after, keeping up the conversation as she maneuvered from room to room looking for the man she had been after, even when she wasn’t responding to him with much more than a nod or noncommittal “hm,” and at last, with her feet twinging from her heels, she took a seat at the bottom of the stairs and he nestled up right beside her.

“We made a pretty good team back there,” he said with a nudge to her shoulder. In any other context it could have been cute but it bothered her thinking.

“I guess,” she sighed. The wig was starting to itch at the nape of her neck. “Brock never showed up, did he?” _Casual, casual, keep it casual_ \--and now even passing thoughts of hers echoed in Clint’s voice. Super.

“Were you actually really looking for him or something?”

“No,” she lied, an easy feat at any level of intoxication thank god. “I heard he may have been looking for me though.”

“Shame he didn’t seem to be.”

Her face was growing in the dim reflection of those sunglasses as he leaned it, brought his forehead to hers and his hand up to the base of her neck--but even as he moved towards her she was already standing.

“Sorry, I’ve got to go.”

Natasha didn’t look back as she slipped out the door, and once she got to the next block over, she reached down to take off her shoes and hold them in one hand, heel pointed up, with her phone open in the other. No missed calls, but one text from Clint--a simple smiley face sent less than fifteen minutes ago.

He was still up when she bounded up the stairs and into his room-- _their_ room, for all intents and purposes, but she really only used the dorm room she had been assigned for storage anyway. “Hey there, Nat,” he mumbled from his sprawled out position tangled in the comforter as she flung the wig on top of her backpack in the corner, haphazardly changing into one of his old t-shirts and pairs of soccer shorts. “Successful ni--oh!”

A small jump onto the bed had put her right on top of him, straddling his hips and burying her face in the crook of his neck. “So...maybe not so successful.” She felt his arms wrap around her back and his head tilt towards hers even as she tried to bury it further. “Is everything okay?”

“I’m not the one who spilled beer all over his brand new anatomy book,” she mumbled into his neck. Her foot pointed to the floor where indeed there was a sizable amber stain covering a diagram of the ribcage.

“Aww, no, really--”

“Yeah really.” She lifted herself up so that she was sitting on his thighs, staring down at him. “You’re a disaster.”

“You’re avoiding my original question.”

She climbed off him and nestled beside him--didn’t look at him, even though she could feel his gaze on her, instead staring up at the ceiling with its peeling paint and weird pastel stains from a legendary neon-blacklight party that still had stories told about it ten years after the fact. “Maybe,” she sighed. “I think it’s going to be a little more complicated than we thought.”

“Wasn’t it complicated to begin with?”

“Yeah. That’s the problem.”

Clint propped himself up and lightly pecked her on the forehead, then again more softly on the mouth. “That, much like my textbook problem, can probably wait til morning.”

The light clicked out and he was snoring in seconds, but all that was running through Natasha’s head were the question marks floating before the Mystery Brother’s identity, Brock’s conspicuous absence, and the very real possibility that Hydra wasn’t taking the time to wait for morning at all.

 


End file.
